1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a multiprocessor power-on switch circuit, and more particularly to a multiprocessor power-on switch circuit using a selection circuit to switch power-on circuits.
2. Related Art
It becomes more and more difficult to improve the operating and processing capacity of a processor simply with the current techniques, and thus many manufacturers producing processors resort to develop the parallel processing technology for multiple processors, so as to enhance the operating and processing capacity of a computer (especially a server). In addition to a computer, the technique of multiprocessor can be used in almost all the operating devices, such as personal digital assistant and digital television.
If a computer employs multiprocessor, more than one processor is disposed on the mainboard. Although the number of the processor has changed from one to several, only one processor is required to perform the power-on action when needed, and the processor for performing power-on is a predetermined one of the processors.
A current multiprocessor mainboard circuit has two architectures: one is multiple processors used together with a set of peripheral circuits, the other is multiple processors used together with multiple sets of peripheral circuits and each processor has a special set of peripheral circuits. The mainboard in which multiple processors share a set of peripheral circuits is now able to cope with the situation that the processor performing the power-on action fails according to various processing mechanisms. However, currently, as the multiple processors use the respective peripheral circuit architecture individually, when the processor for power-on or the peripheral circuit thereof fails, the mainboard has no corresponding processing mechanism, and the mainboard cannot automatically switch to other processors and peripheral circuits to perform the power-on action, even if more than one processor and peripheral circuit that can operate normally are disposed thereon, thus making the whole computer completely unusable.
Therefore, it becomes an issue to be solved urgently that, how to provide a function to automatically switch to other processors to perform the power-on action when the processor for performing the power-on action or the peripheral circuit thereof fails.